Interpretive reading of fiction is the main theme of Message between the lines, aresearch and development project currently in its third year. This projectinvolves Swedish, Swedish as a second language and mother tongueinstruction teachers at different school levels. The aim of the project is toexplore how students interpretive reading of fiction can bestrengthened. Interpreting texts is a foregrounded learning objective in theSwedish curriculum. However, cross-nationally comparativestudies (Johansson, 2015) have recurrently found shortcomings in students'interpretive literary analyses. With a theoretical framework informed byLanger (2011), and with a design-based approach (Cobb et al., 2003), theproject investigates essential components in interpretive reading and theinstruction thereof. Our investigation is focused on the pedagogical potentialof combining modality transformations (e.g., reinterpreting picture-based storiesin writing) and author experience, that is, when students themselves produceinterpretable texts in the form of stories, poems, comics, etc. Preliminaryresults suggest that students’ interpretive reading practices benefit from thedesign investigated. For example, students’ ability to see fictionalinterpretations not as singular “messages” but rather as pluralistic seems tobe strengthened. Further, it seems that when students themselves take onan authorship role that mandates them to produce multi-layered, multiinterpretable, and multi-modal texts, their awareness of interpretivepossibilities increases. Cobb, P., Confrey, J., DiSessa, A., Lehrer, R. &Schauble, L. (2003). Design experiments in educational research. EducationalResearcher, 32(1). Johansson, M. (2015). Läsa, förstå, analysera: En komparativ studieom svenska och franska gymnasieelevers reception av en narrativ text. LinköpingUniversity Electronic Press. Langer, J. A. (2011). Envisioning knowledge: Buildingliteracy in the academic disciplines. New York: Teachers College Press.